5 things the Xbox One needs right now

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The launch honeymoon for Microsoft’s latest console has passed, and with that comes a hard look at what the Xbox One really needs next.

If you are one of the more than three million users with a pair of glowing “X” icons gracing their entertainment center, there’s a good chance you have a suggestion (or two) for Microsoft about how the Xbox One can be improved. While we continue to work our way through the launch titles and get to know the console, there’s more than a couple of features that are just plain missing. Microsoft could dramatically improve the overall user experience if the company fixed these issues as quickly as possible.

Battery life indicator for controllers

This one seems like it would be the easiest to fix, and by far the most obvious. The only way you know what your remaining battery life is on an Xbox One controller is when it stops working. Whether you’re using AA batteries or a battery pack from Microsoft, this is beyond frustrating. Even if the feature was only available for the Xbox One rechargeable battery packs, this is one of those things that causes instant gamer rage in the middle of gameplay.

Figuring out where to put it would be somewhat challenging, but it seems like the best place would be the menu panel that you can access from the controller. This would mean leaving the game briefly to check battery status, but since the Xbox One makes it so quick and easy to jump in and out of games it is unlikely that this would be a huge inconvenience, especially when compared to having your controller die in the middle of a boss fight.

More sharing options

While we know that Microsoft is busy sorting out direct broadcasting with tools like Twitch.tv and YouTube, there’s still a really great game DVR service available. The Xbox One makes it easy to capture a game with very little effort and its editing capabilities are intuitive, but once you’ve created a video your options are depressingly limited. Getting a video to YouTube right now means exporting to SkyDrive, downloading from SkyDrive on a PC, and then uploading to YouTube. Microsoft… you can do better!

Since you clearly are connected to the internet, it seems obvious to allow uploading to more than just Upload and SkyDrive. While these are obvious choices as starting points for Microsoft, it would be beneficial to support other services. Even if Microsoft isn’t ready to support other video services, being able to upload video content to Dropbox would be a trivial thing to add on. The Dropbox API makes this sort of thing really easy, Microsoft just needs to pull the trigger.

Kinect voice support in apps

This is likely more an issue with app developers than Microsoft, but Netflix users actually lost functionality moving from the Xbox 360 to the Xbox One when it comes to Kinect. The Xbox One version of Kinect does a significantly better job than its predecessor when it comes to controlling basic system functions, but once you leave Microsoft space and head to Hulu, Netflix, or anything else you lose Kinect voice support. While the Xbox 360 implementation of voice control in these situations was overly basic and often frustrating when it didn’t quite understand you, the service was still great when it worked.

Being able to search for videos, being able to select a video for playback, and being able to snap other services without causing problems with playback would all be much appreciated features. Microsoft does allow playback voice controls once a video has started playing, but you still have to keep a controller powered up and close by in order to use any of the streaming services on the console right now.